The Theory of Moral Sentiments

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

Author: Adam Smith · 1759 (revised through six editions, last in 1790) An Essay towards an Analysis of the Principles by which Men naturally judge concerning the Conduct and Character, first of their Neighbours, and afterwards of themselves.

The Argument in One Paragraph

Morality is not a contract, not a divine implant, and not a calculation of utility — it’s what self-love becomes when it grows up inside society. We start out wired for sympathy, the imaginative capacity to “fellow-feel” with the passions of others. We watch our neighbors and form moral judgments about their conduct based on whether their feelings match what we, as observers, would feel in their place — what Smith calls propriety. But we have no direct access to ourselves; we are as blind to our own character as we are to our own face without a mirror. Society is that mirror. By watching others react to us, we slowly internalize an outside view of ourselves. The internalized observer becomes the impartial spectator, “the man within the breast” — the disinterested judge whose verdict on our conduct is our conscience. Virtue is the long discipline of bringing our actual passions into line with what this internal spectator could approve. Conscience is not given to us; it is built, one social reflection at a time, out of countless small acts of being seen.

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What the Book Is About

The Theory of Moral Sentiments is the foundational book of Adam Smith’s career — the one he taught from at Glasgow, published in 1759 when he was thirty-five, and kept revising for the rest of his life. The sixth edition, finished in 1790 just months before he died, contains substantial new material on the corruption of moral sentiments by admiration of wealth and rank — Smith’s moral philosophy growing darker with age, even as his economic optimism stayed steady. People who only know Smith from [[the-wealth-of-nations|The Wealth of Nations]] are missing the half of him that came first and that he never stopped working on.

The problem the book sets itself is straightforward and ancient: how does an animal as fundamentally self-loving as a human being end up with a conscience? Smith’s answer is genuinely original. He won’t accept Hobbes’s reduction of morality to fear of the sovereign, or Mandeville’s reduction of virtue to disguised vanity, or the rationalist line that moral truth is a kind of geometry the mind can prove. He also rejects the simpler “moral sense” theory of his teacher Francis Hutcheson, which posits a special faculty that perceives virtue the way the eye perceives color. For Smith, morality isn’t perceived — it’s constructed, socially, through a process he reconstructs step by step.

Step one: sympathy. “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” Sympathy isn’t an emotion; it’s a mechanism — the imaginative capacity to put ourselves in another’s place and feel, in muted form, what they feel. We see a man tortured on the rack; we cringe; we feel a shadow of his pain in our own bodies. This is how morality starts.

Step two: the spectator. When we observe a person reacting to some event, we don’t just feel with them — we judge whether their reaction is appropriate. If their grief at a small loss is wild, we find it disproportionate. If their joy at a real triumph is muted, we find it cold. Propriety is the “concord” between the observed person’s actual feeling and the feeling we, as imagined spectators, would have in their place. This is the foundational moral judgment: was their feeling fitting? Not whether it was useful, not whether it was commanded by God — whether it fit the cause.

Step three: the mirror. Now Smith makes the move that distinguishes him from everyone before. We are objects of judgment to others just as they are to us. Living among people who watch us, sympathize with us, judge our reactions for propriety — we slowly come to see ourselves through their eyes. “Were it possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character… than of the beauty or deformity of his own face.” Society is the mirror in which we first learn what we look like, morally. Children, animals, the isolated, do not have a developed conscience because they have not had the mirror.

Step four: the impartial spectator. Once we have learned to see ourselves through the eyes of others, the gaze becomes portable. We carry it inside. When no one is watching, we still imagine the watching — but now the imagined watcher is not any specific neighbor (who might be wrong, prejudiced, partial). It’s a refined, idealized observer: the impartial spectator, “the man within the breast,” “the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.” This is conscience. It’s not implanted; it’s built from the ground up out of social experience. But once built, it stands above any actual social opinion. We can know we have done well even when the world condemns us, because the impartial spectator approves. We can know we have done wrong even when the world cheers, because he does not.

The book then unfolds as an extended description of how this internal apparatus actually works: how it judges merit and demerit (the propensity to reward and punish), how it grounds the rules of justice (which are precise and enforceable, as opposed to the looser virtue of beneficence), how it explains the moral force of custom and the corruption of moral sentiments by admiration of the rich and great. The sixth-edition addition on this last theme — “the corruption of our moral sentiments which is occasioned by this disposition to admire the rich and great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor and mean condition” — is the late Smith at his most acid. He had watched the consequences of his own century, and he was less optimistic than he’d been at thirty-five.

Key Concepts

• Sympathy. Not pity. The imaginative transposition by which a spectator places himself in the situation of the person observed and feels, in attenuated form, what that person feels. “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others.” Sympathy is the raw material of every moral judgment.
• Propriety. The “concord of the spectator’s and the agent’s sentiments.” A passion is proper when its intensity matches what an impartial observer would feel in the agent’s place. Excessive grief is improper, but so is callous indifference. Most moral judgment, for Smith, is about calibration — the moderation of natural passions to the level a sympathetic observer can share.
• Merit and demerit. Beyond propriety, we judge actions by whether they call forth gratitude (merit) or resentment (demerit). Gratitude wants to reward; resentment wants to punish. From these two reactive sentiments Smith derives our entire system of moral approval and the social demand for justice.
• The impartial spectator. Smith’s defining concept. “The man within the breast.” The internalized, idealized observer whose judgment is conscience. Built from social experience but, once built, capable of overriding actual social opinion. The Stoic ideal of the wise man rebuilt as a developmental psychology.
• Self-command. The supreme virtue, in Smith’s account. The capacity to bring our actual passions into line with what the impartial spectator can approve — to soften grief enough that others can share it, to restrain anger to the level a fair observer would countenance. Self-command is not the absence of passion; it’s the discipline of passion to a socially-shareable pitch.
• The two virtues — justice and beneficence. Justice is precise: it forbids specific harms (theft, murder, breach of contract) and can be enforced by punishment. Beneficence is loose: it commends generosity, friendship, charity, but cannot be coerced. A society can survive on justice alone — coldly, badly, but it can. It cannot survive without justice.
• The corruption of moral sentiments. The disposition to admire the rich and great, to despise the poor and mean. Smith’s late, dark theme. Society naturally rewards the appearance of greatness over the substance of virtue, and the moral sentiments themselves get warped by this — we sympathize more easily with kings than with beggars, even though the beggar may have more to grieve.

Key Quotations

1. “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” — Part I, §1. The opening sentence; the foundation of the whole project.
2. “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.” — Part I, §1. The mechanism of sympathy.
3. “Were it possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character… than of the beauty or deformity of his own face.” — Part III. The mirror argument.
4. “We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it.” — Part III. The impartial spectator defined.
5. “The man within the breast, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.” — Part III. The most famous formulation of conscience.
6. “Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence; but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it.” — Part II. The asymmetry of the two virtues.
7. “This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition… is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” — Part I, sixth edition. The late dark theme.
8. “The all-wise Author of Nature has, in this manner, taught man to respect the sentiments and judgments of his brethren.” — Part III. The providential frame Smith works inside even at his most analytic.

Metaphors That Carry the Argument

Metaphor	What it signals	Where
The mirror of society	We have no direct knowledge of our own character; only by seeing others react to us do we acquire a self to judge.	Part III
The man within the breast	Conscience as an internalized, idealized observer — not a divine implant, but a social construction we carry.	Part III
The concord of sentiments	Propriety as a kind of harmony — the matching pitch between the agent’s actual feeling and the spectator’s imagined one.	Part I
The invisible hand	A first appearance, in moral form: the rich, in their luxury, are “led by an invisible hand” to distribute the necessities of life among the poor. The metaphor that will return seventeen years later in Wealth of Nations in economic dress.	Part IV

Who He’s Arguing With

• Thomas Hobbes ([[the-leviathan|Leviathan]]). The contractarian alternative. Hobbes makes morality a contract that fearful egoists tolerate because the alternative is the war of all against all. Smith refuses the reduction. We don’t need a Leviathan above us if we have the impartial spectator within us.
• Bernard Mandeville (The Fable of the Bees). The satirist who reduces every virtue to disguised self-love. Smith concedes the diagnostic acuity — yes, vanity is everywhere — and refuses the conclusion. The fact that virtue grew out of self-love does not make virtue an illusion. The plant is not its seed.
• Francis Hutcheson. Smith’s teacher and the Glasgow chair before him. Hutcheson posited a “moral sense” — a sixth faculty that perceives virtue directly. Smith builds his entire account precisely to do without that posit. We don’t need to perceive virtue; we construct it through sympathy and the spectator.
• The rationalists (Samuel Clarke, William Wollaston). The school that derives moral truth from the structure of reason itself, like geometry. Smith finds this disembodied. Real moral judgments are made by creatures who feel, not by minds that calculate, and the feeling-mechanism — sympathy — is what an honest moral psychology has to start from.
• The Christian moral theologians. Smith never attacks them directly, but the whole architecture is a quiet substitution: where divine command theory locates moral authority in God’s will and natural-law theory in eternal reason, Smith locates it in the social construction of the impartial spectator. The “all-wise Author of Nature” hovers in the background, but the working machinery is entirely human.

How It’s Written

Long, balanced, eighteenth-century sentences with the architecture of an Enlightenment treatise — the kind of prose that opens a clause, qualifies it twice, returns to the main verb, and only resolves at the end. Smith works through extended observational examples drawn from polite society, family life, the reactions of bystanders to street accidents, the conversations of gentlemen — the fabric of mid-century Edinburgh and Glasgow given a moral-philosophical x-ray. The voice is patient, accumulative, almost novelistic in its attention to social detail. It reads less like a system being deduced than a careful naturalist describing an ecosystem he has spent his life observing. There are sudden moments of bite — the late passages on the corruption of moral sentiments are sharper than anything in Wealth of Nations — but the dominant register is the calm, charitable Scottish professor watching how people actually behave and trying to write down what he sees.

Connections

• Adam Smith — the foundational book; the one he revised to the end. Everything in [[the-wealth-of-nations|Wealth of Nations]] presupposes the moral and legal framework Smith works out here.
• The Wealth of Nations — the political-economic sequel. The “invisible hand” metaphor first appears here in Part IV, in moral dress, before reappearing in 1776 in economic dress. Self-interest as the engine of unintended public benefit is not a Wealth of Nations invention; it’s a principle Smith already worked out morally seventeen years earlier.
• David Hume — the immediate intellectual partner. Hume’s account of sympathy in the Treatise of Human Nature is the technical predecessor; Smith deepens it from a feeling-transfer mechanism into the engine of an entire developmental psychology.
• [[the-leviathan|Hobbes’s Leviathan]] — the contractarian alternative Smith displaces. Smith doesn’t need an external sovereign holding off the war of all against all because he has an internal spectator already doing the work.
• Kant — the parallel project from a totally different angle. Smith builds morality bottom-up from social emotion; Kant builds it top-down from pure practical reason. The Categorical Imperative and the impartial spectator are doing similar formal work — testing universalizability — but from opposite philosophical foundations. Both are answers to the same question: how does a creature whose first impulse is self-love end up bound by the moral law?
• Nietzsche — the great later attacker. Nietzsche’s polemic in [[the-genealogy-of-morals|On the Genealogy of Morals]] against the “English psychologists” is aimed precisely at this tradition — Smith, the utilitarians, Spencer — for deriving moral concepts from social utility and sympathy. Nietzsche thinks the whole sympathy-based ethic is a refined form of slave morality: pity as life-denial, the spectator as the priest’s gaze internalized.
• Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, Hume — the Scottish Enlightenment moral-philosophical environment in which the book was written. Smith’s project belongs to a Scottish school that took seriously the idea that human nature could be studied empirically, like the natural world.
• Power and Morality — the theme page. Smith’s account of how the moral sentiments are corrupted by admiration of the rich and great is one of the eighteenth century’s sharpest analyses of how power deforms ethics from inside.

Lineage

• Predecessors: Francis Hutcheson (the moral sense theory Smith refines and replaces); David Hume (sympathy as a mechanism); Joseph Butler (whose Sermons on conscience and self-love anticipate Smith’s psychological structure); the Stoics (Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus — direct sources for the impartial spectator as the ideal of detached self-judgment); Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (virtue as a habituated mean, character as developed through practice).
• Successors: Immanuel Kant (the Categorical Imperative as a parallel test of universalizability); the Utilitarians (Bentham and Mill — who keep Smith’s empiricism but replace sympathy with calculated pleasure); George Eliot (the great novelistic dramatist of the moral sentiments — the impartial spectator visible in Middlemarch on every page); Karl Marx (whose theory of alienation deepens Smith’s late anxiety about the corruption of moral sentiments under commercial society); Charles Horton Cooley (the “looking-glass self” — early-twentieth-century sociology rediscovering Smith’s mirror); George Herbert Mead (the “generalized other” — symbolic interactionism’s version of the impartial spectator); contemporary moral psychology (Adam Smith is one of the figures most often recovered in twenty-first-century work on empathy, theory of mind, and the social construction of conscience — the late Daniel Kahneman read Smith carefully, and so does Amartya Sen).